Risk factors for psychological harm that I believe to be predictable, neglected, and tractable to address on a shorter-term scale without drastic systemic change.
My general reaction is that some of the issues you identify may implicate moderately deep structural issues and/or involve some fairly significant tradeoffs. If true, that wouldn’t establish that nothing should be done about them, but it would make proposed solutions that don’t sufficiently grapple with the structural issues and tradeoffs unlikely to gain traction.
For example, on the issue of Forum drama (which I’ve chosen because the discussion and proposals feel a bit more concrete to me):
The case of Lightcone et al. v. Nonlinear et al. related to an attempt to protect community members from a perceived bad actor. Without litigating the merits of that dispute—especially since I tried to stay away from it as much as possible! -- there still has to be a means of protecting community members from perceived bad actors. It’s not clear to me that there existed a place to try this matter other than the Court of Public Opinion (EA Forum Division). A fair amount of ink has been spilled on the bad-actor problem more generally, but EA is decentralized enough that the non-messy solutions generally wouldn’t work well either. Likewise, the recent case of In re Manifest was—to at least some of the disputants—about the bounds of what was and wasn’t acceptable in the community. If there’s not anything like the President or Congress of EA (and there likely shouldn’t be in my view), only the community can make those decisions.
Dealing with alleged bad actors and defending core norms are important, so if that isn’t going to be done on the Forum then it will need to be done somewhere else. I think you’re right that people tend to behave better in person than online, but it’s not clear how these kinds of issues would be adequately fleshed out in person. For starters, that gives a lot of power to whoever is handing out the invites to the in-person events (and the limited opportunities for one-to-many communications). Spending more time on community drama could also derail the stated purposes of those events.
More broadly, taking the community out of adjudicating these kinds of disputes would mean setting up some centralized authority to do so—maybe an elected representative assembly or something. That’s possible, and maybe desirable—but it would be a major structural change.
Maybe you could make the online discourse better—but in this case it would have to be by the slow and time-consuming task of building consensus, not by moderator fiat. Finding people with the independence, skill set, community buy-on and time/flexibility to control big on-Forum disputes much more tightly than the mods have would be tough. It’s an open Internet, and if enough of the community thinks topics that need to be discussed elsewhere are being suppressed, there’s always Reddit.
My general reaction is that some of the issues you identify may implicate moderately deep structural issues and/or involve some fairly significant tradeoffs. If true, that wouldn’t establish that nothing should be done about them, but it would make proposed solutions that don’t sufficiently grapple with the structural issues and tradeoffs unlikely to gain traction.
For example, on the issue of Forum drama (which I’ve chosen because the discussion and proposals feel a bit more concrete to me):
The case of Lightcone et al. v. Nonlinear et al. related to an attempt to protect community members from a perceived bad actor. Without litigating the merits of that dispute—especially since I tried to stay away from it as much as possible! -- there still has to be a means of protecting community members from perceived bad actors. It’s not clear to me that there existed a place to try this matter other than the Court of Public Opinion (EA Forum Division). A fair amount of ink has been spilled on the bad-actor problem more generally, but EA is decentralized enough that the non-messy solutions generally wouldn’t work well either. Likewise, the recent case of In re Manifest was—to at least some of the disputants—about the bounds of what was and wasn’t acceptable in the community. If there’s not anything like the President or Congress of EA (and there likely shouldn’t be in my view), only the community can make those decisions.
Dealing with alleged bad actors and defending core norms are important, so if that isn’t going to be done on the Forum then it will need to be done somewhere else. I think you’re right that people tend to behave better in person than online, but it’s not clear how these kinds of issues would be adequately fleshed out in person. For starters, that gives a lot of power to whoever is handing out the invites to the in-person events (and the limited opportunities for one-to-many communications). Spending more time on community drama could also derail the stated purposes of those events.
More broadly, taking the community out of adjudicating these kinds of disputes would mean setting up some centralized authority to do so—maybe an elected representative assembly or something. That’s possible, and maybe desirable—but it would be a major structural change.
Maybe you could make the online discourse better—but in this case it would have to be by the slow and time-consuming task of building consensus, not by moderator fiat. Finding people with the independence, skill set, community buy-on and time/flexibility to control big on-Forum disputes much more tightly than the mods have would be tough. It’s an open Internet, and if enough of the community thinks topics that need to be discussed elsewhere are being suppressed, there’s always Reddit.